All Episodes
Previous Next
April 26, 2009 - No Agenda
01:28:06
92: Swine Flu: It's a Beta!
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Let's go.
Adam Curry, John C. Dvorak.
It is Sunday, April 26.
We've reversed roles.
This is no agenda.
And hopefully not fortunes.
Coming to you from the lovely Gitmo Nation West, or should I say Northwest, in San Francisco.
I'm Adam Curry.
And I'm John C. Dvorak, and coming up, I blew it, right?
From Gitmo Nation East.
Yeah, fantastic.
We'll get it later.
All right, officially the shittiest start of the show ever.
You're giving me crap before we started.
Oh, hold on.
You're over-modulating now.
You've got to turn it down.
You're, like, blowing me out here.
Okay, well, here, give me your...
How does that sound?
Is that better?
No, now you're too soft.
Oh man, you're just going to complain the whole time.
Okay, look, I'll turn you up here.
Okay, this is No Agenda, episode 92, discombobulated, because not only have we reversed locations, we've reversed time zones.
I'm really not a morning person, John, when it comes to doing any kind of show.
It's early for me.
Yeah, well, it's something like 4.30 here in the afternoon.
I'm in Holland, Gitmo Nation East version.
Yeah.
And it's not bad.
It's nice out.
It's raining a little bit earlier.
So, this is your...
Hey, by the way, the first thing I did when I got here, we went out and looked at that giant lock, that big giant dam they built in Rotterdam that closes the ocean.
Yeah.
Have you ever seen that?
Yes.
You have?
Yeah, but for us it's no...
Yes.
My wife is from Rotterdam.
I do go there from time to time.
It took us forever to find the thing.
Yes.
And did you see it in motion?
Probably, right?
No.
They only close it once a year when they have to.
No!
They close it all the time.
Well, it wasn't closed and they weren't moving it.
Okay.
Alright, so John, you're in Amsterdam.
I'm in San Francisco.
I happen to be in a hotel for this trip, and it's a real shithole, which is kind of interesting.
So the setup is different.
Everything is a little bit messed up.
Yeah, but the stream sounds pretty good.
Yeah, stream sounds reasonable.
So tell me about your...
How long has it been since you've been in Amsterdam?
It's been, what, 20, 25 years maybe, last time you were there?
I was there two years ago.
That's what I mean, 20, 25 years ago.
Well, since they sold the smart shops, it might seem that way to you.
Well, no, no, no.
The smart shops only sold mushrooms and other stuff.
Nothing that I was interested in.
Mm-hmm.
So where are you now?
You're not in a hotel?
No.
I'm at Yan Allen's house.
Okay.
And he's part of your little excursion?
Yeah.
He's the excursion.
Well, there's only one thing in the news here, John.
It's going to be a short show if you can't come up with more than one crummy thing.
Well, we can talk about this one for quite a while.
This swine flu is top of the news.
I've got people calling me from Europe saying, oh man, are you okay?
Is it going to be alright?
Because, of course, I came with a cold.
I had a pretty massive head cold, which it could be swine flu for all I know.
But I've been hawking and coughing and sneezing and wheezing and people are like, hey man, there's a clinic really nearby the hotel.
I can drop you off there and you can have them take a look at you.
Everyone is freaking out, John.
My wife in Washington State is worried because she's coming down and she's going to meet up with her friend who happens to have just come up from Mexico.
Yeah, I'd keep that person away from me.
I mean, she wasn't in Mexico City.
I think the whole thing is horseshit, honestly.
I'm not buying any of it.
You don't think there's any swine flu going on at all?
No, I'm sure there's swine flu, and I'm sure it's derived from bird flu or whatever, but people don't seem to be dying in the States.
Only if you're Mexican do you die, so I'm not worried.
Maybe it's a targeted genetic experiment.
I think it's a beta test.
There's a couple of interesting articles that I've been collecting.
There was a Spanish article, let me see if I can find this, that actually spoke of a test, that they were planning a test on April 17th.
Let me see if I can find it now.
So some people think this is just a kind of a get ready.
I mean, to me it seems pretty clear that they've been trying it for a while and the bird flu thing just didn't work.
Swine flu things seem to work a little bit better and now everyone's going to get some pills.
Let's all break out the Rolenza and the Tamiflu.
So what was this thing you read in the Spanish newspaper?
Yeah, I'm looking for it.
As I said, I'm a little slow this morning.
Well, while I'm looking for that, I do have an interesting bit from Bloomberg.
Apparently Panasonic, in February, February 18th, Sent all of their workers home from different outposts in the world as a warning saying that there was probably some kind of pandemic flu coming.
Here it is.
February 10th, I'm sorry.
Panasonic has instructed Japanese workers assigned to parts of Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and South America to send family members back to Japan because of the risk of outbreaks of new influenza strains.
How did they know that in February?
That's weird.
Have they gone back, or are they still in Japan now?
It's just a very short notice I just found on Bloomberg, and it's only two paragraphs.
The Osaka-based electronics maker has asked workers' families to return home by the end of September.
By the end of September.
That's for next year, Lou.
Hmm.
Interesting.
Well, so...
Yeah, you're right.
That means they're gearing up.
They've got it all ready to go.
They're going to give us a flu, a vaccine for four flus, and then they're going to have the fifth one they're going to release and they're going to kill everyone.
Not everyone.
It's only going to...
No, of course not.
It's only going to kill people over 60 and under 15.
Well, you know, the swine flu that's going around has a kill range between 25 and 45.
Nobody younger or older.
It's like he's hitting a middle group.
Yeah, but see, I just don't buy it at all.
I mean, it feels wonky.
As we were flying out, one case cropped up in New York City.
Well, yeah, there was a school closed down because there were kids who were showing influenza symptoms.
And so, oh, everyone's freaking out.
I just think that it's one big piece of bull crap.
And, you know, how do we actually know that 60 people died in Mexico?
Uh...
Well, nobody's going to actually be reporting on such things, so I guess we're just taking somebody's word for it.
Exactly.
Maybe they're looking for sympathy.
Wales now in the United Kingdom has pulled out all the stops, big alert, saying we're preparing, because of course Wales is, they see themselves separate from the United Kingdom.
You know, they have their own Gaelic language and they have their own little enclave there and I guess they have their own setup.
And they're getting ready for the pandemic flu.
According to the top police chief, the National Health Service, Assembly, local government.
Ah, they even have a name for it.
They call it Exercise Taliesin.
So they've got a Gaelic name that came up with some new whale's name.
T-A-L-I-E-S-I-N. Taliesin.
So I have my Tamiflu in the suitcase, which I carry with me wherever I travel.
So I'm ready.
It still works apparently on this new flu.
And I'm telling you, you should either travel with some Relenza or some Tamiflu.
I keep telling everybody this.
I'm not going to get either one.
Yeah, I know you're not.
I'm just saying, I'm advising it so when you get to whatever it is and then moan and groan about it, as you come to the near-death experience, I'm just going to say, you know, was it worth it?
So here's the dots that people are connecting, which I just love.
So on the Last No Agenda, we talked very specifically about Monsanto being kicked out of Germany with their genetically modified pigs.
And so, of course, there's immediate theories, either A, The swine flu propagates through non-Monsanto pigs, which I thought was a pretty good one, i.e., hey man, you can't have these swine flu pigs, you've got to have our pigs, the healthy kind.
That's a good one.
It's a classic, isn't it?
Yeah, I like that.
Or, of course, these genetically modified pigs are the ones that actually are the problem.
But from the way I see it, John, how long have we been talking about the pandemic pandemic?
Probably coming from bird flu.
And we've seen the attempts to try and spread it amongst the population.
And now, here it is.
Literally, it's an HN flu, except it's the H1N1 flu.
Yeah, but H1N1 was bird flu.
That's the thing I haven't had an explanation for.
How do we have the H1N1 bird flu, and now we have the H1N1 swine flu?
Am I missing something here?
Well, I'm pulling up another report here of a medical director who says that this could have only been created in a laboratory.
That's our man.
Yeah, well, it comes from Infowars.com, so via Alex Jones.
No, he's got a lot of good links here.
But, of course, how does bird flu get into pigs, and how does that work?
Here it is.
NPR reported the deadly swine flu combines genetic material from pigs, birds, and humans in a way researchers have not seen before, leading researchers to suspect it was cooked up in a lab.
There you go.
It's doable.
I mean, it seems to me as though if they had that vaccine that they sent out that you kept talking about that had the bird flu in it by accident, that if that got into some people, that would create probably a fourth variation that would be similar to cooking it up in a lab.
So I'm...
I don't know.
I'm just...
I guess somebody's...
You know, I think they're just trying to move some product here.
You know, here's a thought.
You know, Tamiflu, there used to be a couple of things called, I think it was flumidine and a couple of these other things.
There were two variants, I can't remember the exact chemical names, but there were these two antivirals that were used before Tamiflu, and they worked on the flu very well.
And then about three years ago, they just stopped working, and they don't work at all, and so they just took them off the market.
And these are the two, Amanadine something and something.
There's two of them.
And so they took these things off the market, and then Tamiflu came along, along with Relenza, and that took over.
And they're more expensive because the other stuff was kind of a generic, and so they were cheaper.
And Tamiflu's expensive.
When it's anybody out there who wants to get a Tamiflu prescription, and by the way, the insurance companies as of about a year and a half ago will not pay for this.
Really?
Really?
Yeah, because I went into my pharmacist and I got, because I loaded up the family, so everybody in the family has one batch of Tamiflu.
Wait a minute, so the Dvorak family, where they have like a little pill box that they carry with them everywhere and they're all set?
Yeah, that's it.
Wait a minute, can I ask you a question?
If you're truly my friend, now I gave you some gold to carry around, how come you didn't hook me up with some Tamiflu?
Like, you don't give a shit if I die?
Did you listen to the beginning of the show?
Yeah, but you didn't hook me up with any.
You keep saying I will never use this stuff.
Yeah, but it's still about the love, brotherly love.
What it is is your memory is going.
Here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to go to the clinic, the one that everyone wants me to go to, and I'm going to say, get me a Tamiflu prescription, and that will show us, A, if it's available, and if they're even handing it out.
I'm sure there's going to be some kind of rules or regulations put in pretty quick about this stuff, so why don't I do that tomorrow?
Okay, and when you do it, and telling them, and they say, well, I don't think you have the flu, Mr.
Curry, why don't you say to them, well, look, if that may or may not be true, I won't use it now, but I need it as a prophylactic.
Give me a prescription.
Seriously, they're supposed to give it to you as a prophylactic.
How can Tamiflu be a prophylactic?
You would take it in case you thought you were getting the flu, or if you're going into some area where there's a flu or something like that.
Just see what they do.
Okay.
Anyway, so where was I? Oh, okay.
So these other things, these amanadine and these other antivirals just stopped.
It was about two years ago, two flu seasons ago or so.
And then it baffles everybody because it's like, why does this stuff stop working?
And I mean, it stopped dead.
It doesn't do anything.
So then Tamiflu, which is a more expensive product, $100 a dose, Not a pill, but for one regimen, it's five days.
I think you take it four times a day or three times a day for five days.
It's extremely expensive.
And now it turns out that there's some evidence that Tamiflu is stopping working on some of the strains that they have in the flu shot, which means, you know, what now?
Yeah.
Wait, let me finish the thought.
So the thought is, if they think Tamiflu is going to stop working, they're going to have to dump their stocks while it still does work.
So let's create some phony flu scenario and get rid of it.
Get it out of inventory.
How's that?
Is that good enough for you?
The thing is, we're both kind of on the same side on this issue, so there's really not a lot to discuss.
Someone's screwing with us big time.
End of story.
It's just dumb.
I just can't believe it.
Well, anyway, all I'm seeing is reports about you can get a scratchy throat, a headache, maybe diarrhea, maybe vomiting, but it seems like a flu.
You know, and it's just the way it's been jacked up, and it's incredible how this has gone so, you know, pun intended, viral, where I'm getting calls all night long from people saying, oh man, are you okay?
And are they going to let you back into the United Kingdom if you come from California?
I don't know.
I think so.
They won't.
Maybe you're stuck.
Yeah.
While you're over there in the Netherlands, you might want to talk to your host about this.
I had not heard of this until I read it in Spiegel magazine.
Apparently, they're using a...
they call it the mosquito...
But it's a teen repellent system throughout the Netherlands.
Actually, in Rotterdam, out Charlois.
Did you say teen?
Yes, teen, as in teenagers.
A teen repellent.
What it is, it's a device...
That you can...
So wherever kids are loitering, and apparently...
So this is now in use in Rotterdam, or a suburb of Rotterdam.
You hang this device up, and it emits an extremely annoying sound, but at a frequency that apparently can only be heard by people under the age of 25.
So that's got to be...
Oh, that's the...
Yeah, right.
They can hear stuff that adults can't hear, but there's devices being used in Holland...
Yeah!
Have you heard of this?
And, um...
He says, yeah, he's heard of it.
I hadn't heard of it, and I'm like, this is amazing.
This is like super Gitmo Nation stuff, man.
You get like a...
Like a beam.
Like a...
It drives the kids away?
Yeah, it gives the kids headaches and they're like, oh man, I don't want to be near that thing.
And so of course what they're doing is they're hanging these things outside of places where they don't want kids loitering.
So what do the kids do is they go inside the establishment to loiter on the inside.
So it's totally backfiring.
But this is obviously raising human rights issues because it's an outrage.
You're hanging up shit to repel people.
That's not right.
Teen repellent.
You've got to go and find this, man.
You're getting me thinking this is not a bad idea.
Get off my lawn, kids, or I'll turn on the mosquito.
You know, I drive around with my daughter who's 14, and I get some new brakes on the car, and apparently to her they squeak.
And you can't hear them, right?
I can't hear them.
And I mean, you can get them to squeak by doing certain things, but she's claiming that whenever I touch the brake pedal, it's just this gosh-awful sound of screeching brakes.
So I don't know.
Well, I like this whole technology because if there's one thing that's amazing, it's the fact that there's a device that makes teenagers listen to anything.
So why can't I get a hold of one of these devices and send out messages like, clean up your room.
Take out the trash.
Do the laundry.
We need one of these devices.
That's perfect for teenagers.
So, that's pretty funny.
Did you look it up, try to find out if you can buy the thing or buy these devices?
I mean, it must be available.
No, I haven't done the research.
I kind of got confused because I forgot that if I have to get up at 6.30 to set up for the show AM, that I wouldn't really have much time or consciousness to prep properly.
Yeah, well, I figured that would be the case.
Well, then we can go to a couple of the gimmick...
Why don't you play the Real News theme here and we'll go to one of my clips.
Yeah, sure.
I do have some other things that are interesting, but yes, now that you asked for it.
Now, back to Real News.
Alright.
Yes, you had some clips you wanted to play.
Okay, I got the clip.
I was watching the Adult Video Awards, which is one of the worst things you've ever seen.
Because it's like everybody in the audience, they're making out, usually two women, and they're feeling each other up, and then there's a bunch of sleazeballs.
It's just unbelievable.
It's fantastic.
Yeah, it is actually.
There's something fantastic about it.
But, you know, they're like watching a train wreck.
So I watched this woman win the Best New Actress Award, and I think she has one of the most interesting thank you speeches probably ever given on any award show.
And so the clip is, which is the Stoya clip, the woman's name is...
It's got a single name, Stoya.
Okay.
And she's introduced by some dingy blonde who won it last year, and she's kind of a goofball.
All right.
And then Stoya gives her thanks, and I clipped it down so it's pretty short, and it's actually a classic.
Wow, I can't believe that it's been a whole year since I was up here to accept this award.
It was truly one of the greatest experiences of my life.
And now I'm very pleased to have you all join me in seeing who this year's nominees are in the category of best.
Do you have this on video?
I think I might still have it, but the funny thing is, there's a note here I want to put in.
When they have nominations for awards on this show, they nominate everybody they can think of.
The nominations go on forever.
Of course, because they want everyone to show up.
Exactly.
Here we go.
Best New Starlet.
Lexi Bell.
Tori Black.
Chase Evans.
Jalen Fox.
Jaden James.
Nikki Jane.
Jamie Langford.
Jandy Lynn.
Megan Malone.
Priya Ray.
Faye Reagan.
Ryder Sky.
Missy Stone.
Stoya.
Angelina Valentine.
Okay.
And?
I'm shaking so bad for her.
I feel like I'm winning all over again right now.
Stoya!
Yeah, baby!
Come on down, Stoya!
Oh my god!
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
ABN, Digital Playground, Robbie fucking D, June, and just about each and every person that jerks off to my smile.
That's funny.
Yeah, you don't hear that every day.
And they had the band there, too, playing live for the acceptance speech.
That's a pretty big production.
I like it.
Oh, it's huge, huge.
And the thing is packed.
That's fantastic.
It's the same thing they nominate.
It goes on for days with these nominations, and all these people have these phoniest names ever.
And that used to be the only reason to go to Comdex, wasn't it?
When the Adult Video Awards were at the same time as Comdex?
Yeah, they used to have the show at the same time as comics, and you'd drift over to the other show, you know.
Oh, gee, how did I wind up here all of a sudden?
You'd go over there, and it was pretty funny, because for one thing, if you had a video camera or something, the girls would just about do anything.
And it was really quite amusing to go over there and hang out.
But they moved it, so.
So what was the other one I have there, the other clip?
You have something called Fat People Clip?
Oh, yeah.
Well, we can save this for another real news segment, or we can do this one.
This is interesting.
This kind of changes the direction of the show a little bit.
But this is a news report that came out like a week ago.
Now, everything has to have a global warming angle.
So now, this is an actual news report that was done on, I think it was K, I think it was either K... I think it was KPIX in San Francisco.
And they're blaming...
Sorry?
No, no, I'm sorry.
I just started the clip prematurely.
Oh, okay.
Play the clip.
Kit Doe on why researchers say obesity is bad for the environment.
Obesity and global warming, both heavy topics now linked by a new study from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
It says people who weigh more tend to drive more and eat more.
And all that food?
It's shipped on average 1,500 miles from where it's grown to your plate.
Fat people, researchers contend, are killing the planet more so than those who are thin.
All right, finally something I can stand behind.
Now you're talking.
Kill the fat people.
This is good.
Now we're really in this.
The funny thing about this report, which went a lot longer, by the way.
I didn't want to play the whole thing.
There's a bunch of puns throughout because the reporter couldn't take it too seriously.
And then throughout the report, all they showed was the fattest people imaginable.
The TV guys love to show this.
And you never see their heads.
It's just either a shot of their big butt or their big gut that's hanging over, bouncing off their knees.
But what people have got to realize is that this is exactly where we're headed.
And yeah, we laugh about it now, but it's no joking matter because they literally, they're already doing it in the United Kingdom with parents.
They can take your kids away from you if they're obese or if they're deemed obese.
And they're going to do it under all of these new rules and regulations.
You know, hey man, you're too fat.
You're killing the planet.
You're anti-socialist, anti-social behavior.
We've got to cite you for that.
And by the way, look at this lovely camp we have all set up.
Why don't you come over here and we'll train that all off of you.
That camp.
I can change the name.
So there was a report out of England that I was looking at.
It's on the blog, actually.
I guess it was someone who casually said some mom just had a baby and she gave birth to a boy.
I guess they all thought it was going to be a girl.
And she says to one of the nurses, oh, I was hoping it was.
At first she had a cesarean, so she's drugged.
Yeah.
And she says, well, it's too bad.
Here's the name of that story.
While Woozie wishing newborn was a girl leads to mother's harassment and possible.
They almost had her arrested.
Oh, right.
Because she has postpartum depression and she doesn't want the baby.
No, no, they don't know what she had, but I'll just read this.
Woozie from pain medication after a cesarean section swinging from joy over her newborn boy to exhaustion from the strain of delivering him.
Karen Piper mentioned to her doctor that she'd been hoping for a girl.
When nurses finally told Piper she was free to leave, no discharge papers for her son were brought out.
Instead, she faced a parade of inquisitive official visitors, including uniformed police, a social worker, a psychiatrist, and assorted doctors and nurses.
Her baby had been placed on medical hold while government investigators considered whether she was fit to take Luke home to Prince George's County.
What publication was this in?
Well, you can assume where it was from the Daily Mail.
Oh no, this was in the Washington Post.
I take it back.
This is in the Washington Post, not the Daily Mail.
But this is conditioning, John.
Wait, let me see where this was.
This is what this is about.
They're doing it now.
This is what we talked about on the last show with this mom's psycho law.
This actually took place in the United States.
Yeah, and this article is meant to condition you to get you ready for the fact that expectant moms have to undergo psychiatric tests and, if necessary, take the drugs that are prescribed.
Otherwise, you don't get a sign-off.
That's exactly what happened here.
Oh, you seem to be depressed, so we're not going to sign off.
We're not going to release your kid.
Your kid is actually, when it comes out of your uterus...
When it comes out of the womb, it belongs to the government until you can prove that you're worthy of having the kid.
Sorry I brought it up.
So, uh...
It's just the way it is.
I just find the whole thing distressing.
Well, of course it's distressing.
It's just fucking wrong.
Well, it's the common sense factor.
There's some common sense, other common sense stories that have cropped up recently.
You know, it's like, what are these guys thinking?
Well, you know my stance on what they're actually thinking.
Yeah, I know.
You consider it a giant scheme.
Could you just talk for a second while I just go grab some coffee?
Because it's like, I can't quite reach with the headphones.
Yeah, okay.
I got an email from Mike Pelletier, which is a hard name to pronounce, actually.
So, Mike, sorry I got it wrong.
He says, he's talking about the, here we go again, with Portuguese Linguisa.
He talked about another one called Chirico, a Spicer Linguisa.
He lives in southeastern Massachusetts, and you can find authentic Portuguese Linguisa and Chirico at Chavez's Market in Fall River, Massachusetts, ladies and gentlemen.
All right.
May right the butcher shop.
I wonder, you know, we've got a new name on Twitter that's called, I think it's called Linguisa.
And the guy is collecting all the addresses of places that maybe have Linguisa.
Now what is the deal?
How does he do that?
Does he just Twitter from time to time with a new location?
Or can you send a Twitter to him and he'll send you the postcode?
You send a tweet to him and then he does the rest.
Oh, that's cool.
We're going to make a big deal out of this.
I'm going to make this the sausage du jour.
It's just a better sausage.
You hear that?
Yes.
It's a better sausage.
No, I thought you could hear the bells.
No.
I thought the mic was more sensitive than that.
No, I don't like this mic you're using.
I'm just not a big fan of the SM7 or 57?
57.
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of it.
No?
No, it sounds kind of muddled.
Well, it could be the thing on it.
It could be a lot of things.
All right, well, it's what I like.
It's easy to travel with, and it's, you know, fits in a case, and I'll just use it for now, and then I'll get back to my good gear.
Yeah.
The Italian mafia is cleaning up during the economic crisis, according to Breitbart.com.
Do you know how much the Italian mafia clears on an annual basis, just in gross revenue, estimated?
What?
$170 billion a year in Italy.
Wow, that's pretty good money.
Yeah, and of course what's happening now is, and it's logical that this is taking place, you know, now that we have these, you know, what is the main business of the mob?
The main business of organized crime is loan sharking.
So, you know, so they're doing double time in the loan sharking business, but also where they make most of their money is in the knockoff business.
So they have, you know, all the high-value brands, The bags, the sunglasses, all of that crap.
They have that made specially for them in China.
Probably in the same factories, of course, as the real deal.
Yeah, I've always suspected that because occasionally you get...
For one thing, when you take a look at a Rolex clone or actually even bags and some of this other stuff, some of this stuff is obviously cheaper and it's not as high quality.
Some of it is undetectable.
Yeah, it looks exactly the same.
And what are they going to do?
Are they going to put molds together and manufacturing lines to clone a watch that's exactly the same when you could just find somebody who's already making that watch because they're all outsourced, let's face it?
And then just say, hey, here's some money.
I want you to make an extra thousand of these things or ten thousand.
We can't afford it.
Put a plastic top on it if you can't afford the glass or stuff like that.
When you read this article, which is in the show notes at noagenda.mevio.com, you'll really read through this and you go like, wow, man, everyone's got to know these guys are doing it.
I'm sure that they go to the top fashion designers.
You never hear...
Any huge news about, oh, we rolled up this huge counterfeit ring, you never hear about that.
Because I'm sure they don't go after them.
I'm sure it's just like, all right, that's the secondary market.
Maybe they even need the secondary market to keep all the molds and everything in place for the real deal.
It seems like that's completely integrated.
Yeah, I think so, too.
In fact, when I went to Korea, not this last time, but one time before, there's an area of town where they have all these suitcases, and it's mostly for luggage, and Eddie Bauer's stuff, and all this stuff, and it all seems like, you know, pretty good quality stuff, and it's just like five bucks.
You know, everything's five bucks.
So, yeah, I've always been convinced that there's some, with a lot of the clone stuff, it's just as good as the real stuff.
In fact, a lot of people...
In fact, I got pretty good at identifying, especially Rolexes, because I collected a number of them.
And every once in a while, I'd run into somebody who had a...
I always like to look at people's Rolexes, because there is one difference, is that the real ones are usually made with a lot of gold, and they weigh more.
And assorted other bits of bling.
So anyway, the...
People would say, was that a real one?
And occasionally you'd get one that was, obviously, my mom gave it to me for my 30th or whatever.
I guess I got married.
So you haven't got the guts to say, I think it's a complete fake.
So say, yeah, yeah, it's fine, it's good.
From time to time, when I show up at airport security, You know, and I kind of know the drill.
I got the laptop out of the bag.
I got the belt off.
And I know exactly.
In the UK, you don't have to take your shoes off.
And oh, by the way, it doesn't go off even with my boots, which, you know, do have metal in them because they have a separate shoe x-ray machine.
You know, so I'm taking everything off.
But from time to time, they'll say, oh, you have to take your watch off.
And I always have to laugh at that.
And I always say, no, I'm not taking my watch off.
I'm not going to put my watch through your machine.
I can't keep my eye on it when it goes through that machine.
And by the way, it will not set off the metal detector.
Gold is not supposed to set off the metal detector.
Well, not everyone has worse gold.
You know, I've seen some...
Some of the, I was looking at, I was in some foreign country and they had one of these metal detectors that you walk through and it had a, it had some sort of a little gauge at the bottom and I asked the person about it.
It was like a bunch of lights.
And when you walk through it, it would, a light would light up in the vicinity of where something needed to be checked.
In other words, it was the top of your head, the middle of your body or your feet.
Mm-hmm.
Which I thought was the solution to people taking off their shoes, which has been spotty.
Not everybody has to take off their shoes, but now they're making everybody take off their shoes for some reason.
It's like, why am I taking off my shoes?
I wear plastic shoes.
Because we had one douchebag who tried to light his shoe on fire.
Even if they...
Remember that guy?
Yeah, yeah, the shoe bomber.
It's like one guy, you know, and he was unsuccessful.
It didn't work.
Like, oh, now take your shoes off.
We got...
At Heathrow Airport, there's like 15 people extra working now just for the shoe x-ray machine, which you can totally bypass.
You can...
I did it again on my way over.
You go through the right-hand Passport control station, and then once you're through, you can slip right off to the right of the queue for the shoes, and they never stop you.
You just fumble around with your passport until someone else is walking around, you wait for a diversion, and you walk right by, and they've never questioned me.
It's nuts.
Well, the whole thing.
I mean, San Francisco had this.
I told this story before.
I left out of San Francisco this time, but then I realized I left out.
I didn't leave out of the international terminal.
I left out of the domestic terminal to go to Dulles.
But I wanted to go through the...
Through the international terminal so I could have that machine with the microbeam or whatever the heck, the x-ray thing, that crazy thing.
Yeah, the profile capture, what do you call it?
Yeah, whatever it is.
Which I went through, I mentioned this before, but I'll mention it again.
Biometric profile, that's it.
Well, no, it's somehow, whatever, it's called a micro something or other.
But anyway, you go through it and it says, if you go through this, you won't get patted down.
But when you go through it, you get more patted down because they wanted to see how good it did.
I mean, that was the joke of it.
You know, you got a comb in your back pocket?
Yeah, I got a comb in my back pocket.
So anyway, so I wanted to bypass it because they say you can go over the other way and get patted down.
Because I wanted to go over there so I could say, well, I'm going over here because I'd rather get patted down rather than going through that machine and get patted down.
Why should I have to go through all that agony?
You're just a bitch.
I got a nice welcome home, Mr.
Curry, at Customs this time around.
Oh, you did?
In San Francisco?
Yeah, welcome home, Mr.
Curry.
What was interesting, I was waiting for my bag, and for some reason, and I must say I dislike it when you're an upper-class passenger and your bag comes off last.
It seems like that should be done differently.
I've heard other people pitch about this.
Yeah, and it's totally the ground handling services, not actually even the airline.
That's because they see it and they kick it a couple times, drop it on the ground and throw it in.
Hey, let's leave this one in last for this bastard.
This dickhead.
If I was working in a luggage thing, that's exactly what I'd do.
I'd put all that stuff aside, stomp, jump up and down on it and throw it in so it makes sure it comes out last.
That's what I'd do.
That's what you do when you're working class.
Well, that's very disappointing to hear, John.
I'm just telling you.
It's just a fact of life.
So you're just going to have to get used to it.
So I'm waiting there for the bag, and they have the sniffer dog come out, which is a beagle.
Did you ask them what kind of sniffer dog?
I always ask them, and they always tell me.
Well, I didn't ask.
I was just preoccupied and annoyed that my luggage didn't show up.
But apparently it was not a drug dog, because when I got into the hotel and I go to roll up a nice little bit of tobacco there, I look inside my pouch, and it's like...
I'd forgotten to remove some herbs.
That would have been very...
So I guess it wasn't a drug dog.
If it was a drug dog, it's a real shitty drug dog.
It's no good.
And I wonder, how far away can they sniff stuff from miles away?
I mean, how does that work?
The drug dog can smell things from about a two or three foot radius.
Any good drug dog would have spotted what you had brought in illegally.
You know my advice?
By the way, my advice?
Yeah?
Don't do that again.
Yeah, but I didn't do it on purpose.
I had to leave in a hurry.
You know, it's like my plans changed.
What was it doing in your suitcase in the first place?
It wasn't in my suitcase.
It was in my pocket, in my jacket pocket.
Oh, you just walk around with it all the time.
Okay, that makes sense.
I'm a lucky bastard.
Hey, someone sent me a great clip.
I don't have the...
Do we have the Shadow Puppet Theater jingle?
I'm sorry, I don't have it here.
By the way, the Beagle was probably a bomb dog.
No, I think it was an agriculture dog.
I think he was just looking for nuts and bananas and apples and shit like that.
Those are the three dogs.
They have an egg dog, a bomb dog, and a drug dog.
No, I got a welcome home, Mr.
Curry.
You're good to go.
That was really nice.
So, this is like a minute and a half.
It's Barney Frank, who, you know, I just despise this guy so much because he's such a dick.
And he's sitting there and he's helping the bankers screw us out of all of our money and my kids' money and my kids' kids' money.
And I want you to listen to this clip of Barney Frank, who is the chairman of the Banking and Finance Committee, I think it's called.
Yeah, something like that.
Talking about Fannie and Freddie Mac in 2005.
Let me just get this started.
It's a YouTube clip.
Of course, now it's not going to play.
Here we go.
Come on.
Yeah, this is June 27th, speech on the hospital. - I'm pleased to join in support of this resolution Indeed, I was a prime co-sponsor.
The main sponsor is our colleague from California, Mr.
Miller, who comes to Congress with a distinguished record himself in building homes.
And this is a...
Very important resolution, particularly at this time, because we have, I think, an excessive degree of concern right now about home ownership and its role in the economy.
Obviously, speculation is never a good thing, but those who argue that housing prices are now At the point of a bubble seemed to me to be missing a very important point.
Unlike previous examples we have had, where substantial excessive inflation of prices later caused some problems, we are talking here about an entity, home ownership, homes, where there is not the degree of leverage that we have seen elsewhere.
This is not the dot-com situation.
We have problems with people having invested in business plans for which there was no reality.
People building fiber optic cable for which there was no need.
Homes that are occupied may see an ebb and flow in the price at a certain percentage level.
But you're not going to see the collapse that you see when people talk about a bubble.
That's what I wanted you to hear.
Yeah, well, the guy, he's a visionary.
He's freaking Scooby-Doo is what he is.
So, you know, we just got to bring this up from time to time because these guys are such shysters, such liars, such scum of the earth.
They'll lie and cheat and steal and do anything and we just sit by like a bunch of freaking slaves and let it come over us.
It pisses me off.
Well, one of the problems is because of the news cycle.
You know, that's the thing that we try to do here.
Which is to remind people, you know, over and over again because they forget.
They want to forget.
They want to forget.
Oh yeah, and people forget after two weeks.
I mean, it's like, oh, whatever, there's no follow-up, there's no nothing.
So indeed, that's what you're paying for, ladies and gentlemen.
That's what your donations to the No Agenda Armory are all about, is to remind ourselves once in a while what has actually happened, so we're not like the frog that is getting slowly cooked in the boiling water.
Well, that may not be true either, but by the way, that's dvorak.org slash NA. We do need some contributions to keep the show going.
By the way, which brings up a point, and also the noragenderlibrary.com is another good place to go.
So somebody wrote in and said, hey you guys, can you go back to once a week?
Because there's too much material for me to have these two shows.
And I just said, well I didn't really think we were ever going to go back to once a week.
Because we want to go to three times a week if we can get enough money.
But now I'm thinking, well what if he's not the only one who feels this way?
Do people want this once a week?
Like maybe longer?
Or do they want...
Twice a week?
Or do they want three times a week?
So we need to get some input on that.
Well, from time to time I'll get an email that says...
Usually it's their own personal situation.
They don't have enough commuting time.
But the point is, this is chewing gum.
This is disposable.
When...
You know, the news that we're talking about today will probably not be any good tomorrow or the day after.
And if it is, then we'll just bring it up again and there'll be a follow-on.
You don't have to listen to every single show, I guess is the point.
Nor is that possible.
I don't even think it's desirable that you listen to every single show.
But in order to grow any type of critical mass in audience, we actually have to have a minimum of three shows a week to really break through.
We just don't have the...
We have to give up other things to move to three days a week, which is why we're working on the donation system.
But I fundamentally disagree, and I'd just like to say, you know, this is not like your typical podcast where, you know, you just have to listen to it and it's the highlight of the week.
I mean, this is not just entertainment.
This is something that you should, you know, when you have the time, you tune into and you get important information, but you can come in and go out, you know.
You might miss some good story about the Adult Video Awards, but, you know, Yeah, but it's not life and death.
No.
It is for Stoya.
By the way, she's got a website.
I think it's just Stoya or something like that.
You should check her out.
She has what I would call a nice body.
I think I have her on the pay-per-view channel.
I'll check.
You might.
She's been in a lot of movies.
I'm reliably informed she might be on my pay-per-view channel.
Apparently, she's a Twitterer.
There's a number of porn stars who are Twittering.
There's a bunch of strippers that are on Twitter.
It seems like...
I guess people follow them.
I noticed I checked a few of them out and most of the information is dull.
You know what?
I saw something really fun the other day.
There's an account.
Let me see if I can find it because I am subscribed.
I think it's like erotic...
London or something like that.
But someone has hooked up Twitter to Craigslist, and when someone posts in the sex services on Craigslist, which of course are basically all hookers, then you get a tweet for your location that you're subscribed to.
No, wait a minute.
Give me this again.
Okay, so you know on Craigslist you have the Erotic Services Division, which is where all the hookers post their, you know, new in town, available tonight.
So you can subscribe to...
Passing through.
Hot babe in town, one night only.
You can subscribe to a Twitter account, and I think it's Erotic London.
Let me see if that's right.
Hold on.
So this is for the London hookers.
Yeah.
So there's one for Amsterdam.
There's one for every city, basically.
Let me just see if that's the one.
Erotic London.
I'll find it and I'll put it in the show notes.
So the minute someone posts a new ad in that category, then you get a Twitter about it.
It's interesting.
Yeah, I guess.
If you're out whoring around.
Although, you know, I wondered, you could probably rig that.
I mean, you'd set that up and you'd have your little stable.
Yeah, of course you'd have yours at the top.
Are you kidding me?
Absolutely.
Yeah, that's a scam.
Absolutely.
So there was...
Oh, my son...
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
No, go ahead.
No, please.
Go ahead.
No, please.
No, you go ahead.
Please.
So my son sent me a critique.
I guess he listens to the show once in a while.
Now which son is this?
Is this JJ or is this Eric?
John.
And so he...
We don't call him JJ. Yeah, I do.
So he...
Go ahead.
So he is turned into the Yo Agenda guys, apparently.
Oh, he's now against us?
No, he's not against us.
He just thought he would...
Now he's giving us...
Because he types so fast.
I've talked about this before.
I mean, he puts together...
You know, he's just like ridiculous.
But anyway, so he's got a couple of things here that he's complaining about.
And one of them is the following.
And he's got it marked at 107.00.
He says, Dad, it isn't cool to publicly like Family Guy anymore.
Oh.
Which I didn't know.
I didn't know this either.
This is important.
I guess the kids know this stuff.
Yeah, this is...
So I can't publicly...
I can like it, but I can't publicly like it.
This is definitely a...
And now, back to real news.
You may no longer like Family Guy.
What is supposed to be cool then?
What are we allowed to like?
He doesn't say.
This is it.
This is today's kids.
They're all just negative.
He talks about the metal detector in the G-Phone, and he doesn't know what he says there.
I freaked the guys out at the office, our engineering geeks, when I showed them that.
They couldn't believe it.
Yeah?
Yeah, they're like, how does that work, man?
How does that work?
I said, well, of course, if you were listening to No Agenda, you would know that there's an electronic compass in the G-Phone.
So he mentions that we should probably try to get some sound clips of old Jerry Brown, who used to be the governor of California and is running again and is a crackpot.
You know, they call him Moonbeam out here or in California.
And he might have a good point there.
Acid Rain, he says, is still around, and he just goes on and on with some other stuff, like New World Order to poison bacon.
What he should do, and what I would suggest, is there's a couple of ways you can interact with this show.
There's obviously still a lot of use, noagendadrop.com, which is where you can chat at any time, in fact.
But you can also drop in news.
And if there's something that you feel is incorrect, please put some information in there so everyone can see it.
There's also noagendaforums.com, which another one of our listeners slash producers maintains.
And then we have an IRC channel coming up.
Yeah, but we're not going to launch that until we're both back in our respective bunker and command centers.
But no agenda forums, I think, is probably a good idea to go and have conversations.
And he shouldn't just be writing letters and sending them to you.
He should post that publicly.
We're obviously not going to be right about everything.
In fact, we're probably more wrong about things than we're right about them.
Exactly.
We're probably wrong about that.
Which means we're right, more often than not.
You know what I'm saying?
So the Village Voice, which I think still has significance in New York, doesn't it?
It used to be the newspaper you had to read if you wanted a job or if you wanted a place to live in the city.
But I think it's still very relevant when it comes to news.
Would you agree?
I wouldn't disagree.
There's this...
And this is on the website, obviously.
It's a letter from a reader.
And it's too long to read the whole thing, but what this guy is saying...
In fact, the title of the article is Nazi Pentagon Experiments in Queens.
And for several years now, residents in Queens have been receiving...
Electrical shocks to their bodies while they're in bed.
They feel pinpricks.
They get headaches.
Honey, what was that?
Shut up and go back to bed.
So they have helicopters hovering overhead and these people literally wake up in the middle of the night and they can feel their skin being zapped.
At least they're doing it in Queens.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know why they chose Queen specifically.
Well, there's a lot of good reasons, probably.
But this is the...
If this is true, this sounds completely like the...
Completely nuts.
No, it's the electromagnetic...
Dude, there's like...
All these neighbors are confirming all this shit is happening.
This has been going on since 2003.
And as recent as...
Here, Tuesday.
He has like a little running diary.
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009.
3.32 a.m.
Tap on the comforter over left knee.
Plane overhead.
Woke up from my sleep.
4.51 a.m.
Thud on comforter over both knees.
Then a moving wave travels longitudinally up the comforter the distance of one foot from the knees to the thighs.
Wakes me up again.
Aircraft still overhead.
And then, you know, there seems to be a high number of people who have died of brain cancer in this Queens neighborhood.
This is really pretty crazy stuff, and if it wasn't published in the Village Voice, I would have maybe dismissed it a little more easier.
You mean if it was published in the New York Times, you would have just written it off?
Yeah, exactly.
So check that out in the show notes, because you know my stance on that.
Yeah, we need to follow up on that one.
I'm going to.
Well, I'm hoping people...
I'm sure we have listeners in New York, and maybe we have a few in Queens, but it's an outrageous account of what these people have been going through for years.
And it's concerning.
8.30pm, pinprick to the right hip, plane overhead.
Electrical shock to my neck at 8.43pm, plane overhead.
Both legs involuntarily move for one second as if electrical current has been applied to them.
Maybe it's just the one guy.
You know, we had these, you know, that's like the guy who gave us the 5150.
You know, there are these people out there, and anyone who's worked with the public in a government agency, they run into them because they're always calling in and complaining about this sort of thing.
You know, you go over there and the guy's got aluminum foil plastered all over the walls and a thing on his head and he's always pointing here and pointing there saying, yeah, they got a bean coming in from the window and they're trying to bake me over here and on one thing or another.
Right, but see, I don't write those guys off.
I really don't.
Yeah, well, maybe you do hang out with them.
I'm not sure, but I find them to be hard to deal with, to be honest about it.
For one thing, they're so sincere, and they're looking for someone to believe them, that it's kind of, I don't know, I feel uncomfortable around those folks.
Sorry for you out there.
I'm sure there's a few of them listening to this show.
I would hope so, because they're the only true connection to what's going on.
Send all your crazy shit to me.
I won't call you a nutcase.
While you're in the Netherlands and in the Amsterdam area, you might want to go, we already discussed this, you might want to go check out the museums.
As you know, was it Goldman Sachs who was recalling the, or basically taking possession of the bend in the Heerengracht painting by Rembrandt?
Right, the one at the Rijksmuseum.
Well, now ABN Amro says, hey, we have a painting that we need to remove from the exhibit as well.
The self-portrait of Rembrandt is now part of another multi-million dollar claim.
So all these...
Well, that painting's been a...
It's a self-portrait I'm thinking of, which is the one where he's kind of middle-aged.
Yeah, with a hat.
Darker.
He's wearing a hat.
I actually have a fairly good...
Copy of that painting painted in China that I picked up when I was in Xiamen.
And I went to the shop that has all these, you know, they're all a copy shop.
And it's interesting because some of these paintings, these copyists in China, this one company has 250 of these guys that are just painting stuff constantly.
And I was going through the paintings that I thought were pretty cool, and he laid out about 10 of these Rembrandt self-portraits.
And one of them, you look at one to the other, to the other, to the other, and you've seen the painting enough times, and you say, that's the one I want.
And you grab it, and it's like 50 bucks.
And it's a nice painting.
It looks good in the hall.
But the weird thing about it, which is the reason I want to tell the story, is that also there's some guy in China that does nothing but Mona Lisa.
And this guy is pathetic.
He has never hit Mona Lisa.
I swear to God, I saw 20 pictures of Mona Lisa.
Never really looked like it, huh?
And every one of them is like, her eyes are too close together.
Her forehead is the wrong size.
What's happened to her?
She's got a hair lip.
I mean, it's one thing after another.
And she's not really that cute to start with.
But, you know, put her eyes too close together and give her a hair lip.
It doesn't take much.
It's just a millimeter difference.
That Mona Lisa painting is actually hard to copy.
I mean, I've seen copies of it that are fair, but this guy just specializes.
I don't know if he's ever hit it ever.
So...
Just to finish on the story, so this Dutch multi-millionaire who secured a multi-million euro loan with this Rembrandt painting.
So this is a whole separate case from the one we talked about on the last show.
He is not behind on his payments.
He hasn't defaulted, but apparently the bank thought it was necessary to...
To file a lawsuit to ensure that their lien would be valid.
It's actually ABN Amro and JPMorgan Chase.
So they're out there embarrassing this guy, saying, hey, if this guy defaults on his loan, then that painting's ours.
It just has a disgusting feel to it, this whole art as collateral thing.
Art is supposed to be for everybody.
Yeah, or the owner.
Yeah.
So you might want to go take a look at the painting before it's gone.
I was there last time I was in town is when I went to the Rijksmuseum and I saw it then.
I mean, I could go back and take one more look and say goodbye painting.
Goodbye.
There's other museums I haven't seen.
Have you ever been to the modern art museum, the state look?
No, as a matter of fact.
The only museums I've been to in Amsterdam were the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum.
Yeah, you should go to the Stadelik.
It's right around the corner.
It's the Museum of Modern Art.
And probably my favorite exhibit, which I think is on permanent display, is Who's Afraid of Red, White, and Blue?
Which is just this massive painting of a red, a white, and a blue stripe.
Sounds fascinating.
Yeah, it is.
Color field paintings always have a kind of a, I don't know, unless they're done right, they're pretty hard to take.
So a guy sent, Michael Cosme sent us another photo, which I think I'll send to you so you can put it in the show notes or put it on the webpage.
And he says he's going to send one every time he sees this.
This is these towers that are cropping up in Manhattan that look like a, it's hard to say what they look like, They look like a sniper.
It's like some sort of a thing that's like an elevator with a booth on the top of it that he calls a sniper's tower.
And it's for, I guess, crowd control or something, even though I don't see any holes where a gun can come out and shoot people.
But the NYPD has these things all over the place.
You know what I'm talking about?
No, I have no idea.
Oh, well, let me send you this.
Can you send me the picture?
Yeah, send me the picture.
Let me take a look.
Let me just forward this to your email.
It'd be easier because it's in an email.
So, anyway, it's a...
Yeah, he's been finding these things and I told him to send them all.
And he's been sending...
I guess we haven't passed it along.
But you need to post this.
So...
People can say, I'd like to find out what they are.
I mean, maybe we should call New York City and find out what the heck's going on with these things.
Maybe you'll get it in a second.
So what else you got on your list?
I'm looking for the audio, or preferably video, so I'm not going to read this whole thing because I have the transcript, but I'll do it on our next show.
Maybe someone can help me find the actual source material of Al Gore lying to Congress.
Representative Blackburn was questioning Al Gore at the global warming legislation hearings.
We talked about this, so now watch out, because here it comes.
Here come all the taxes on everything that emits carbon, including the actual words coming out of your cake hole.
And he talks to, I guess it's a he, right?
Blackburn?
I think so.
He talks Gore completely into a corner, basically making him say or admit that he is profiting from all of his green initiatives.
And just reading the transcript, it's beautiful.
But what happens is, so here it is, I'll just read this.
So you're a partner at a venture capital firm.
They've invested a billion dollars in 40 companies that are going to benefit from cap-and-trade legislation.
Remember that.
So is the legislation that we're discussing here today, is that something you are personally going to benefit from?
And then the transcript goes, Al Gore, sigh.
I believe that the transition to a green economy is good for our economy and good for all of us.
And I've invested in it.
You need to have the lisp in your voice to make that really work.
And I can just see him sighing just like a 12-year-old.
I know.
That's exactly why I want to have the real source material.
I have invested in it.
But every penny that I've made, I've put into a non-profit.
The Alliance for Climate Protection to spread awareness of why we have to take on this challenge.
And Congresswoman, if you believe the reason that I have been working on this issue for 30 years is because of greed, you don't know me.
And then Blackburn comes back and says, no sir, I'm not making accusations.
I'm asking questions that have been asked of me and individuals, constituents that were seeking a point of clarity.
So I'm asking, and so here it comes.
Every penny that I've made has gone to it, my non-profit.
Every penny from the movie, the book, from any investments, from renewable energy, I've been willing to put my money where my mouth is.
Do you think there's something wrong with being active in business in this country?
Ha ha!
So he immediately throws the, you know, is doing business bad?
So he's out and outright lying that it's all in a non-profit because it's not.
He's making tons of dough off of this.
And he left the White House with $2 million reportedly in his pocket.
And now he so far has invested $35 million of his own money in for-profit endeavors.
And he's sitting there saying to Congress, no, no, no, no, no, this is all non-profit.
Unbelievable.
Yeah, well, everyone who listens to the show knows that we're no fans of Al Gore.
Do we have to talk about any nights of the No Agenda Roundtable, other than the 1081 quest, which you left me with?
Do you have the 1081 email handy?
Because I'm looking for it now, and I can't find it.
Yeah, I can probably find it.
Why don't you set it up?
No, we have no more new nights, and this is disappointing.
But if anyone wants to be a knight of the No Agenda Roundtable...
Make sure to give us a thousand dollars for the show and then you become one.
We're sorry.
It seems there's a problem.
Please try using Gmail with a supported browser.
What?
What browser did you use?
Safari.
Of course it's a supported browser.
That's odd.
This happens.
Gmail has changed a couple things.
They also changed the way they do their attachments.
So now there's like a little flash thingy in there.
When you attach a file, it uploads the file to the server first before it sends the email.
And I've seen online, lots of people have this problem.
They attach a file.
You wait for like three minutes and it's almost done.
And then it'll say, oh, attachment failed.
And you can't fix it.
Yeah, you have to blow out your entire cache.
I'm not going to do that.
You know, I'm going back to pop mail.
I'm getting sick of the slowness of IMAP, you know, the whole thing.
It's ridiculous.
Yeah.
So the 1080-1...
Besides, the thing that really bothers me is that I can't do IMAP when I'm flying around in an airplane.
Um...
I know I can have the combination.
But I don't do that.
The other thing is that I was using Thunderbird and I got 65,000 messages on my IMAP account.
The thing chokes at 65,000 messages.
It goes, I can't have any more messages.
I can't take some messages out.
So he takes the messages out.
It doesn't change.
It still says he can't deal with it.
Once some flag is triggered, it seems to me that the thing just doesn't want to talk to you anymore.
It's like a jilted lover.
And I can't find any clients that are any better.
Well, what's worked really well for me is, as you know, I'm doing the command line thing, mutt.
You configure that with IMAP, and then you can set up a little cache directory for your header files and stuff like that.
Hey, hey, I don't care about it.
This is ridiculous.
Go ahead, gooey boy.
Go ahead and be slow.
Nobody's going to do what you suggest.
Lots of people are doing what I suggest.
Yeah, all 13 of them.
So, let me look for that email.
Do you remember the guy's name?
Oh, you know, if I was at my house where I have his name scrawled on the wall with a can of spray paint, which I have all the nights, by the way, are on the wall of my office with spray can paint across the wall.
That's how I remember their names.
I can't remember names, so I have to spray can paint them.
Wait a minute.
You spray paint your wall with the names of the knights?
Yeah, with a can of Krylon, black.
Okay.
What's wrong with that?
No, nothing.
Don't you do that?
Gee, no.
What?
Crap, I don't know.
I don't know.
Okay, well, we did get a lot of people thinking they knew what it was.
They're all wrong.
Yeah.
Well, here's the most interesting one from John W. Kitts, who sends us lots of...
Let me see if I can go on the PayPal account and then get his name again.
You do that and I'll read some of the wrong answers.
So we got a donation of $1,081 from one of our three Knights of the No Agenda Roundtable.
And of course the numerology thing is just beautiful because it gives us a way to get big numbers out of people.
John W. Kitts sent in his thought why this 10-81 was an interesting number from the official 10-code list Association of Public Communications Officers.
So you have 10-4, obviously, is Roger or affirmative.
You have 10-21, which is what is your location.
And 10-81 is a code for the breathalyzer.
Which I thought was a good...
Oh, that's not bad.
I like the answer.
It wasn't what it was, but it's very creative.
And didn't we have a 5264?
Maybe, but you know somebody pointed out something interesting, which was some of these people who are donating from Europe...
The money may be coming in as some oddball number because of the change from euros to dollars.
Good point.
And we might be like interpreting these things when it's really like the guy gave us 50 bucks but it came in as a 42.16 or something.
We're saying, well, it's a year of the Star Trek episode on number three.
Here's my favorite one.
So the 52-64.
Add 52 and 64.
That gives you 116.
Read 116 upside down and you get 9-11.
That's a good one.
That's funny.
Yeah, that's pretty funny.
Let's see if I can actually access my PayPal account here from Holland.
Because 90% of the time, unless I'm on that one machine at home...
It tells me to screw myself.
You're a criminal.
Let's see what we got here.
How much does PayPal take off the top of those donations?
They take too much.
You know, the rip-off, and we should probably discontinue this, is the $2 a month thing.
It's better to do $24 a year because the $2 a month thing, they take like 30 cents or something.
It's like ridiculous.
And then they take 30 cents off the 24.
I mean, it's just like, it's all going to PayPal.
Okay, so I got into my email, and I think the guy's name is Steve.
Steve, can we give his name or not?
Of who?
No, it's not Steve.
The guy, the No Agenda Knight.
Shit, it's not Steve.
I don't have the spray can here.
Okay, I got it.
It's Michael.
There we go.
Michael.
Can I give his last name?
Yeah.
Michael Zelina.
I'm sorry.
Sir Michael Zelina.
I knew that.
Yes.
And, of course, you had to tell me after the last show because I was going to pull my hair out.
Yeah, but wait, let me give some people a briefing.
After I told you, and you're going to hear one of the most convoluted things in your life, Adam says, oh man, I was going there.
I was getting it.
I was almost there.
I would have come up with that, not completely.
I would have come up with, because I knew it was going to be some geeky thing.
I knew it.
So, Sir Michael Zelina, I'll just read his, I'll read his email.
Characters are represented as numbers in ASCII encoding.
This is the part I would have gotten to because I have had to deal with ASCII codes doing a lot of this command line stuff.
So for example, the letter L is 76.
So if you look up the letters in the table for, and here it comes, look and listen, You come up with a series of numbers like 76, 79, 79, 75, 76, 79, 79, 75, 76, 73, 83, 84, 86, 88.
So if you add them up, so he just wanted to do look and listen, but he wanted to make sure we got over $1,000, so he made it look, listen, look.
And if you add all of the ASCII codes of look and listen and look together, you get 1,081.
Yeah, and you were headed there.
I was definitely headed there.
Yeah, you almost got it.
You heard all the other answers.
I think that drunk driving was even better.
He was involved in campaigns against genetically modified food, and he fully supports what we're doing here on No Agenda to keep people aware of how we're getting screwed.
There was a good news story last week about how the Indians, I think I Twittered it, I don't think I blogged it, About how in India, they have somehow talked these poor Indian farmers into giving up their normal seeds in favor of Monsanto seeds.
Weren't there like 1,500 suicides or something?
There's a lot of suicides because these guys are going broke.
What happens is you get something like one-tenth as many seeds for your investment And the seeds which are supposed to grow ten times faster and give you a huge crop, many of the crops failed and never grew for crap.
They were junk.
And so these guys are basically wiped out.
You don't have Monsanto going in there with microloans by any means.
So it's like a big scandal in India.
And it's about Monsanto.
I think Monsanto should rethink their strategy.
I think their strategy is now just starting to unfold.
I think they're just loving it right now.
I don't think they give a crap.
And they're all over the administration, who, of course, are now in their 100 days.
That's another big, real news story over here.
And I would have to say, just scanning across the dial, the president gets very high marks from the media, who are apparently representing the people.
Yeah, the media representing the government.
So there's another one that was interesting I ran into.
Actually, I'll have to look him up now.
But the guy who...
There's a report that came out that Merck had this product called Vioxx, which apparently was killing people.
Yeah, that was the painkiller that was actually killing the pain for real.
Yeah, well, it worked.
Yeah.
Except when you got a stroke, that didn't help.
So anyway, let me see if I can find this, because I've got to get the guy's name right.
Anyway, the CEO at the time, and I was, you know, when you had, there was a bunch of, they unturned when they had, during Discovery, which is a real problem for these companies, you know, they don't like to get sued because Discovery is like a nasty thing.
Bites you in the butt.
Yeah.
So they found some memos from the marketing department and maybe went as high as the CEO. It's hard to say, but everything's a reflection of the CEO when it comes down to it.
Who says that there's doctors that are not prescribing Vioxx and we have to destroy them.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, shit.
You okay?
I think he just fell off.
Somebody just grabbed out and came out the window.
They're trying to take me out back, John.
I'm getting two to the head.
No, I did read this.
They had the hit list memo.
We've got to discredit them, destroy them, get rid of these doctors.
And of course, Vioxx is the shit that wound up killing lots of people.
Oh, I know, man.
It's a freaking outrage.
Yeah, here's the kicker.
The kicker is I've got to get this guy's name.
Maybe somebody will.
I could tweet it.
The guy who then retired like two years after the crap hit the fan regarding this stuff.
He wanted to stay in.
He was wrecking the company anyway.
He's a board director at Microsoft.
Oh, yeah.
I just found it abhorrent.
And the funny thing is, I have to get his name because I think we should talk about this guy every so often.
Because as a CEO, he wants to go out and discredit people and try to destroy their lives.
I think we should just hound him.
Somebody should do it to him, don't you think?
I've been here for three days and I can just feel throughout my whole body how we've lost that public media fight, John.
In China, you put shit in baby food, we're going to kill you.
We string you out publicly and we sentence you to death.
What about the peanut butter guy?
What happened to him?
Did we hear anything about that dude?
Yeah, whatever happened to him?
No, nothing.
The guy's name is Raymond V. Gilmartin, and he's the former chairman, president, and CEO of Merck& Company when they put out the memo to destroy the doctor's reputations.
So he is a member of the Microsoft board, along with...
Listen, you know, I don't know why these people are even on the board except for James Marquardt.
There's a woman from Harvey Mudd College.
There's a chairman of the board of BMW, an AT&T guy, a guy from J.P. Morgan Chase, or woman from J.P. Morgan Chase.
You know, I mean, okay, whatever.
Just a screwy board.
No wonder the company's in trouble.
They had their first down quarter in all their history.
Ever, yeah.
Ever.
Well, I think it's finally coming to fruition.
Actually, I'm giving a speech at a college in New Jersey, and of course I don't remember which one it is, this week.
You get the spray can out, you can remember more.
Yeah, the hotel will love me for it.
And I think I'm going to lay it out on the line for him, because this is about music licensing and the music business in general.
Anyway, I'm doing a favor for a guy, a friend of mine, so I'm going to go talk to him.
But 15, 20 years ago, when the Internet was just kind of this thing that was emerging, in fact, when it was still rude to just jump into a news group and post something without having read through the netiquette of it all, and certainly no commercial messages, remember those days, Oh yeah, and if you did it, you'd be flamed to death if you violated the rule.
Oh yeah.
Well, dude, when I registered MTV.com, people hated me.
Oh, oh, here it is.
Now it's ruined.
The internet is ruined.
We're bringing in commercialism.
But I think it's just coming to fruition.
The internet is taking away everybody's business.
Music business is dead.
Newspapers, dead on the vine.
Television, movies.
It's just no stopping it.
It's just going to die away.
Phone companies, you name it.
And now everyone's jockeying.
What was I reading about?
Now the cable companies, it's like, I think they're really in cahoots with the government at this point, and they're really going to try and make certain things just completely unaffordable so that you can't just stream a video if it's coming from outside the network or outside of whatever package you're going to be able to buy into.
It'll only be cheap if it's their shit.
I mean, there's something afoot, and there's a lot of nastiness going on, and we're just letting it all pass by.
And...
Well, we have to start complaining more.
Hey, you know, this connection that we have seems to be pretty good.
And I think it's interesting is that when I'm in the California and you're over in Europe, the connection is pretty good.
And now I'm in Europe and you're in California, the connection is pretty good, even though you're at the hotel.
But if I'm in California and you're at the hotel, it sucks.
What the hell is that all about?
Yeah, isn't that interesting?
Where if we're a stone's throw away, then it's no good.
It must be something...
Well, who knows?
Maybe we should swap computers.
By the way, he's got a connection.
Yan has a connection here, which is...
He's got like 20 megabits per second coming into his house.
Nice.
And it's on DSL, and he's waiting for fiber where he can get even 30 megs.
And he's paying like $1.95 a month or something like that.
What, $195?
He's paying $30.
It's like $30 for something like that.
Oh, man.
I'm jealous.
All right, John, tell me what's on the agenda for the next couple days for you in Amsterdam.
We're going to go take a look at the miniature world, I hope.
Ah, yeah, of course.
Hey, you know, the weather will be just as shitty there as in the real Holland.
Actually, right now, the sun came out.
I mean, it was raining this morning, but now it's actually pretty nice.
But, you know, I'm sure it's still going to be miserable most of the time.
And then we're going to go, of course, to the giant party.
Now, I didn't realize that the night parties for Queen's Day are the night before.
Yes.
See, I was doing some research because I was pointing out to somebody what I was up to.
And then I looked at the page, it says the parties of the night before, and I'm thinking, wow, it's a good thing I read this.
If you showed up on the evening of the 30th, you would have been severely disappointed.
So the way it works...
The night of the 29th is when you just party like a madman and then you stumble home at 7 in the morning.
And of course beforehand, and I don't know if you can already see it, they may not have started yet, but people will mark out on the sidewalks, they'll mark out their spot with chalk.
And they'll put their name on it or their house number, like, okay, this is my spot, so you can't take that.
And it's like drawing little real estate lines.
This is true for the...
Sorry?
I'm sorry.
This is for selling stuff, right?
Yeah, for selling stuff.
Exactly.
So you stumble home around 7 in the morning, then you get all your crap that you want to get rid of, and you throw it out on the street, and you sit down there on a blanket, and you wait for people to buy shit from you as they walk by.
And then if they buy all your stuff, then you go walk around and you buy someone else's shit.
It's a fantastic system.
Somebody told me that the park, there's a park that gets loaded up with stuff.
Yes, the Fumble Park.
Yeah.
So, yeah, so the party is...
The party's the night before, okay.
Yeah, and you probably won't need to go there before 10.
I mean, it won't get started.
Does he even say what time it gets started?
I'm so pissed off that I'm not there.
Goddamn.
Well, it's too bad, isn't it?
So...
Yes.
It doesn't say what time it gets started.
I guess about midnight?
Is that what you think?
Yeah, probably.
Anytime after 10, it'll make sense.
My girl's going to hook you up.
She's going to take good care of you.
But at 10, there's nobody there, you're saying?
No, after 10.
Not before 10.
No, nothing happens before 10.
I was going to go there at 6.30.
Hi, I'm here for the party.
Hi, we're the Americans.
First, I was going to go to dinner at 4 because they have an early bird special.
And then I was going to probably, you know, take a nap and then go to the party about 6, 6.30.
Oh, you can eat salad bar, John.
Perfect.
Yeah.
Good luck with that.
Enjoy that.
And definitely call Taxi Eric, man.
He's on standby.
He's ready for you.
Yeah, okay.
He's good.
He's ready.
All right, well, we'll see.
I'll report back with photos.
Yes.
So I have this.
Talking about it, I want to make a public complaint.
Okay.
I got another one of these cards.
This is the third or fourth time this has happened to me.
I have a 16 gigabyte compact flash.
I stick it into my camera.
I take about 10, 15 pictures.
And then it says, flash, you know, memory no good.
It just stops working.
Oh, I thought, yeah, and it breaks and you can't recover your pictures?
No, you can recover your pictures with some special software.
I'm not worried about that.
But I couldn't make any more photos.
I have 16 gigabytes.
Yeah.
Yeah, this flash...
Yeah, that's wonky.
That flash...
I've had that happen so many times.
I'm now convinced that that's the reason that they never came out with those hybrid hard disks.
Because I think hooking flash memory to a hard disk and having the stuff fail left and right.
Even though it doesn't fail that much, but it fails too much considering what the mean time between failures is supposed to be with a hard disk.
It's just not viable.
I don't think anyone wants to admit it.
I'm going to go get me a netbook today.
You know, I did something really stupid, because I'm all alone here in San Francisco, and of course you're not here, so I have nobody to play with on the weekend.
So I'm like, you know, I'm going to go out, and what do guys do when you're totally bored?
You go out and shop, right?
So I walk out.
First I went to the leather store.
I want to see if I can get a new leather jacket.
Oh, here we go.
Some amazing shit.
But no.
But then I'm like, I use my G-Phone.
I'm like, I'm going to be completely cyber.
And I'm going to...
So I'm on market.
I say, okay, G-Phone.
I'm looking for computers.
And it gives me...
An address on Van Ness.
So, you know, an interesting walk from where I am.
You know, it's about a mile and a half or whatever, two miles.
And you know where it took me?
It took me to the Circuit City on Van Ness.
Oh, that's funny.
Which is, of course, closed.
Yeah, of course, they're out of business.
They're completely out of business.
And I walked two miles.
I'm like, uh, okay.
Where can I go to get a netbook, John?
At least you had a nice walk.
Yeah, is there a place nearby that I can go?
A computer store where you are?
Yeah.
No.
Cool.
Thanks.
San Francisco, what do you expect?
They got a lot of bars.
Coming to you from the crackpot shithole hotel room, my name is Adam Curry.
And coming to you from Gitmo Nation East, a.k.a.
Holland, I'm John C. Dvorak.
▲
Export Selection